Robert and Martha Hanrott

About Us

We live in Washington DC and London and enjoy writing and creating music together.

Robert studied singing under the opera singer Anne Ferry, and has sung with the Malcolm Sargent Festival Choir, Swanbank Music in London, and the New Dominion Choir in Washington D.C. He wrote and recorded an album of songs in collaboration with lead guitarist, Mick Wayne, available on this website. He has a head full of melodies and wishes he remembered the names of people as well as he remembers music and lyrics from the past.

Martha studied music theory and orchestration at Catholic University and has had private tuition on harmonization and arranging of melodies with Scot Hawkins. She is currently studying classical and jazz piano at Levine School of Music with Jeffrey Chappell.

Our first joint composition was the incidental music for Studio Theatre’s production of Alan Bennett’s “Talking Heads” in 1996. We then wrote two one-act musicals (one for children) and a full-length musical based on the life of Pamela Harriman. Latterly, we have concentrated on composing chamber music and short piano pieces with the advice of several experienced composers — Andrew Simpson, Jonathan Leshnoff and Massimo Flugelman. Our first chamber piece was a cello sonata, now on this website. Other compositions will appear here as they are professionally recorded. We would like to thank all those who have helped us along the way!

We have three publications, also described on this website:

Telling Tales, a book of short stories inspired by our walk from Canterbury to Rome in the summer of 2000.

Foxtails: the Adventures of Freddie Fox, a CD of stories with music for adults and children.

And we have web pages featuring political satire, light verse and poetry, and cartoons. The political satire comes under the heading of Mild Subversion; it covers topics ranging from events in the Middle East to “Sound Science”.

Finally, Robert runs the Epicurus Blog, whose objective is to make the ideas of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus, relevant to the modern world.